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Calm down, housing affordability not that bad, says RBA

Peter Martin

Declining rates of home ownership aren't necessarily a bad thing, according to the Reserve Bank.

Addressing a conference of housing researchers in Melbourne, the Bank's head of economics, Luci Ellis, said participation in the housing market "need not be about owning your own home".

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'Same problems as London': Morrison doubles down on negative gearing

High property prices in the UK show that Australia's housing affordability crisis is not related to negative gearing, Treasurer Scott Morrison told business leaders in Marylebone, in the UK.

"Many people rent, someone else has to own those dwellings as well," she said. "In Australia, most private rental properties are owned by other households."

While the proportion of 25 to 34 year olds owning the home they lived in had fallen from around 60 per cent to around 50 per cent since the 1970s, this wasn't necessarily a cause for concern.

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"Most of the decline happened by the early 1990s, before the big increase in housing prices relative to incomes," she said. "What changed during that earlier period was that people started partnering and settling down later in life."

Ownership rates for young people declined partly because "many people wait to settle down before they buy a home".

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"By saying this, I am not suggesting that people should not worry about whether households can achieve their desired housing tenure," she said. "I am suggesting that the situation is more complex than would be suggested by a single-minded focus on a single metric of affordability such as median housing prices."

"Much of the commentary around the difficulty of achieving home ownership centres on the task of accumulating the deposit. It seems common to assume that everyone needs a 20 per cent deposit when they first buy.

"This isn't actually true: although lenders require some deposit coming from genuine savings, it doesn't have to be as high as 20 per cent.

"So it's surprising that as housing prices have risen, the loan-to-valuation ratio hasn't shifted up over time. One reason might be that more borrowers are getting help from friends and family to accumulate the deposit. Careful analysis of data shows that the share of first home buyers receiving that help has been increasing over the decades, but actually remains low."

Dr Ellis, until recently the Bank's housing specialist as head of its financial stability division, said a neglected concern was security of tenure. While a lot of renting was voluntary, renters appeared to be forced to move far more often than they would like.

Over the 13 years to 2015, around 60 per cent of owners stayed put whereas 75 per cent of renters moved. Eighteen per cent moved five or more times.

"We know that moving house can be disruptive and costly," Dr Ellis said. "So I question whether all those moves by renters were desired by those households."

"If we are concerned about inequality of housing outcomes, perhaps we should focus less on the type of tenure, and more on security of tenure."

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